The Register

Up, up, and away in my silky eight-legged balloon Video Spiders can detect the Earth’s electric field, and use it to lift off and fly through the air, according to new research.…

I'll keep the smartie I've got, thanks A strong smartphone product range hasn't helped Samsung Electronics buck what is a saturated and exhausted phone market in the developed world.…

Bright spark trash panda wanders into substation – watt happened next is electrifying Folks relying on mains-powered alarm clocks had an excellent excuse for turning up late for work on Friday in Seattle – after a raccoon knocked out power to a chunk of the northwest US city.…

Project axed after iGiant snubs Chipzilla's wireless silicon A new ultra-fast-wireless Intel chip will not make its way into next-generation Apple iPhones, and will be axed, the chipmaker confirmed in a roundabout way.…

Said to have netted only £34... A Japanese man has received a suspended sentence for using the Coinhive cryptominer in a failed attempt to turn an illicit profit.…

If he did, HPE has to prove he deliberately deleted them HPE's assertions that Oracle boss Mark Hurd intentionally deleted emails related to a legal spat over operating system software are "mere speculation," the database giant has told a district court in northern California.…

10nm? Ha, try 7, or even 5 Samsung has said its chip foundry building Arm Cortex-A76-based processors will use 7nm process tech in the second half of the year, with 5nm product expected mid-2019 using the extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography process.…

STS Commercial you're fined: Pay b4 August GET 20% off A Welsh firm has been handed a £60,000 fine for spamming more than 270,000 pay-day loan texts around Christmas 2016.…

Let's hope there aren't any blushes amid the bits and bytes next week Good news for England fans. Advanced artificial intelligences reckon there is a good chance of England beating Sweden to progress to the FIFA World Cup semi-finals this weekend.…

Cool, but streaming doesn't mean screaming Analysis You can't store files in Amazon's public cloud, access them on-premises, and expect local disk access performance.…

You've really Notched it, Cook One day Apple may look back on its great iPhone X adventure and view it as an embarrassing midlife crisis, like running off with the au pair.…

Financial watchdogs threaten more regulation to focus minds on business services, comms Banks were today told to assume there will be problems with systems and to work on their backup plans following a series of failures caused by increasing reliance on technology.…

When intuition lets you down, you're stuck between ROC and a hard place Machine learning is about machines making decisions and, as we have already discussed, we can produce multiple models for any given problem and measure their accuracy. It is intuitively obvious that we would elect to use the most accurate model and most of the time, of course, we do.…

Wizards of Oz nudge tech past proof-of-concept Australian researchers have managed to store information on light-emitting nanocrystals, and they reckon a cubic-centimetre chunk of the stuff could hold a petabyte of data.…

Investment enables maker to push out more models Exclusive Planet Computers, the tiny British outfit reviving Psion-style handheld computing, has told The Reg it has received new investment which enables it to produce further models and fulfil its retail ambitions.…

Amazon CEO is pruning my roses Something for the Weekend, Sir? Jeff Bezos does my gardening.…

Chillout by raising some cold hard cash for vulnerable youngsters It might be high summer now, but if you fancy chilling out with the great and the good of both tech and entertainment, sign up for October’s Byte Night now.…

Creators call for political backing and 'new momentum'... so not a mercy killing then? Politicians have been told to help the UK's flailing Government Digital Service gain new momentum by unpicking Whitehall power structures.…

HP Ink refreshes its schleppable workstation range days after Dell did the same A couple of days back we covered Dell’s new portable workstations and now HP Ink has launched some too.…

All it took was a three-fingered salute and some autoexec.bat action On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register’s attempt to make Fridays tolerable by bringing you fellow readers’ tales of terrifying tech support jobs they somehow survived.…

Clueless DNS overseer sees lazy efforts torn apart – again European data regulators have torn up the latest proposal by internet overseer ICANN over its Whois data service, sending the hapless organization back to the drawing board for a third time.…

And you thought AI couldn't get any more mind-boggling Scientists have built neural networks from DNA molecules that can recognise handwritten numbers, a common task in deep learning, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.…

It's the largest dwarf galaxy to smash into us yet found Around eight to ten billion years ago, a neighbouring dwarf galaxy known as the Sausage galaxy smashed into the Milky Way leaving a smattering of gas, dust, and stars.…

100-seaters are now a duopoly, too, so please don’t mention the trade war Aerospace giant Boeing looks to have addressed a weakness that Airbus exposed last year, by proposing a joint venture with Brazilian plane-maker Embraer.…

Slow virtual server provisioning incident mistakenly given Red Alert status IBM’s cloud is having a bad day.…

Alleged unethical behavior from a grey hat? Who'd a thunk it? A former worker at NSO Group – the Israeli biz infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments nice and nasty – has been charged with stealing his employer's spyware, and trying to sell it for $50m on the black market.…

DARPA-funded white hat emits timeless advice AppSec EU IT admins should focus on the fundamentals of network security, rather than worry about sophisticated state-sponsored zero-day attacks, mobile security expert Georgia Weidman told London's AppSec EU conference on Thursday.…

Big Cable lobbyists abandoned after grassroots campaign California lawmakers promised to introduce the "strongest net neutrality protections in the nation" on Thursday morning, just weeks after a key piece of the legislation was gutted at the committee stage, sparking online fury.…

Big Cable lobbyists abandoned after grassroots campaign Californian lawmakers promised to introduce the "strongest net neutrality protections in the nation" on Thursday morning, just weeks after a key piece of the legislation was gutted in committee, sparking online fury.…

White and black hats tinker with XML .SettingContent-ms files as a method to deliver malware Hackers have been experimenting with a newly discovered technique to commandeer Windows 10 boxes.…

A summer of straightened smug holiday snaps beckons As the US partied and the UK made increasingly desperate “well, we dumped YOU” jokes, the GIMP team celebrated 4 July by emitting a fresh stable build of the arty application with a function aimed at fixing drunken photos.…

60% faster IOPS Analysis NetApp has beaten IBM's biggest, baddest all-flash storage box in an industry-standard benchmark.…

Spending watchdog's report also has barbs for outsourcing and, of course, Brexit UK government bodies collect data "as an afterthought" or when they've been caught off-guard in a grilling, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee's chairwoman Meg Hillier has said.…

Pirates: We saved the internet! The European Parliament has kicked back a vote on proposed copyright law changes until September to allow tempers to cool and the agreed text to be re-examined.…

'Not an issue with our network', say UK2.net techies Updated ISP TalkTalk is no longer on speaking terms with Brit hosting provider UK2.net – as far as networking their customers over the internet is concerned.…

Partial beer for a partial outage? Brit hosting provider UK2.net is no longer on speaking terms with TalkTalk – at least as far as customers of the telco are concerned.…

Redmond filings hint at portable computer for the less flush Microsoft fans hoping to sate their desire for a Surface device without selling a non-vital organ to fund it may have taken a step closer to realising their dreams this week.…

MEPs call for urgent fix The Privacy Shield deal governing transatlantic data flows should be suspended if the US doesn't comply by 1 September, the European Parliament has said.…

Israel claiming it was Hamas Security researchers have unpicked mobile apps and spyware that infected the mobile devices of Israeli military personnel in a targeted campaign which the state has claimed Hamas was behind.…

No sir, you CANNOT import this stuff from outside the EEA again The bosses of a now defunct distributor have coughed a seven-figure settlement to Cisco after admitting they violated trademark laws by importing kit from outside the European Economic Area.…

This whole business is starting to look like a cargo cult Finding a new form factor for personal computing is harder than Microsoft thought. Reports suggest Redmond has gone back to the drawing board for its "Andromeda" handheld due to incomplete software.…

Committee warns on potential for huge pain if there's a gap The UK government has been told to urgently start negotiations for a data adequacy deal with the European Union – or risk damaging business and placing a prohibitive burden on small firms.…

Folk confronted by 'Invalid Properties' error on login Employees signed up to Sage's 50cloud Payroll service have been having problems accessing their payslips after an update borked servers.…

Not just another generic court building. Oh no London is to get a new court building, billed as a legal centre for tackling cyber and online economic crimes.…

One does not simply 'remove' data from key servers Cryptographic key servers are in "direct violation" of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, a software developer has claimed.…

Big Red Buttons cause big trouble Who, me? Special Welcome to a special edition of “Who, me?” The Register’s opportunity for readers to get their worst mistakes off their chests. We’re usually here on Mondays, but with the United States Independence Day making for slow news days, we decided to keep The Register’s servers red-lining by running an extra column.…

Weak password, no 2FA, loose policies ... and only luck limited the damage The developers of Gentoo Linux have revealed how it was possible for its GitHub repository to be hacked: someone deduced an admin’s password and perhaps that admin ought not to have had access to the repos anyway.…

New optical standards give cable operators lots of headroom as they fibre up Boffins at CableLabs, the cable TV network operators' pet research house, have turned out two fresh photonic standards: the P2P Coherent Optics Architecture Specification; and the P2P Coherent Optics Physical Layer v1.0 Specification.…

This matters because carriers follow where BoffinNets first tread Europe's GEANT and Australia's AARNET have joined The Internet Society's Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative.…

Government trumpets savings, Big Blue trumpets quantum blockchain innovation revolution IBM and Australia’s federal government have signed a billion-dollar five-year whole-of-government procurement deal.…